More evidence that the public school systems are working about like you’d expect from a .gov system, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars “invested” in it over decades, despite the creation of the Dept. of Education ($1.2 trillion alone – not inflation adjusted – since its establishment in 1980):
Literacy study: 1 in 7 U.S. adults are unable to read this story
Key grafs:
A long-awaited federal study finds that an estimated 32 million adults in the USA — about one in seven — are saddled with such low literacy skills that it would be tough for them to read anything more challenging than a children’s picture book or to understand a medication’s side effects listed on a pill bottle.
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How low? It would be a challenge to read this newspaper article or deconstruct a fuel bill.“They really cannot read … paragraphs (or) sentences that are connected,” says Sheida White, a researcher at the U.S. Education Department.
Well, good to know we spent $1.2 trillion to find that out!
But all is not bleak!
In many cases, states made sizable gains. In Mississippi, the percentage of adults with low skills dropped 9 percentage points, from 25% to 16%. In every one of its 82 counties, low-skill rates dropped — in a few cases by 20 percentage points or more.
Still, there’s more bad news:
By contrast, in several large states — California, New York, Florida and Nevada, for instance — the number of adults with low skills rose.
Why, you might ask did Mississippi improve so remarkably? Need you even ask?
David Harvey, president and CEO of ProLiteracy, an adult-literacy organization, says Mississippi “invested more in education … and they have done innovative programming. We need much more of that.”
We need more money! MUCH more money!
I swear, it’s the only play in the playbook. WE NEED TO SPEND MORE (of other people’s) MONEY!